ON "NARRATIVES"

SURVIVE OR FLOURISH?

(I wrote this essay over two decades ago, when I was deeply involved with the Objectivist movement. While my interests have changed, my basic philosophical outlook has not. And while I might write this somewhat differently today, the perspectives on ethics that I expressed back then have not changed much at all. If you are an Objectivist, libertarian, or Aristotelian, you may find this thought-provoking. I hope so. --Robert Bidinotto, April 19, 2016)

SURVIVE OR FLOURISH? A
RECONCILIATION

by Robert Bidinotto

Published
in Full Context, Feb. 1994, pp. 1-5,
and in April 1994.

Part I

For some time now, a very important debate has raged among
Objectivists and Aristotelians concerning the final end in ethics. The key matter under dispute: whether or not the
Objectivist ethics [the morality defined by Ayn Rand] -- grounded in the
natural requirements of "life" and "self-preservation" --
is sufficient to provide man enough guidance to lead a full, rich, happy and
distinctively human life.

The debate was joined when David Kelley critically reviewed (in
the July 1992 Liberty magazine) the
book Liberty and Nature, by two
Objectivist-influenced (but Aristotelian-oriented) philosophers, Douglas
Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl. It has continued since in these pages (see, for
example, Henry Scuoteguazza's "Man's Life and the Fulfilled Life" in
the April 1993 Full Context); and it
has spilled over into protracted electronic mail arguments in the Ayn Rand
discussion forum that Jimmy Wales moderates on the Internet.

In his review of Liberty
and Nature, Kelley summarized clearly the essential differences between the
Objectivist position which he endorses, and the Aristotelian position upheld by
Rasmussen and Den Uyl. Writes Kelley:

The point of departure for their argument
is Rand's insight that values arise from the fact that living organisms must
act to stay alive -- to preserve their own existence. Because anything that
exists has a specific nature, they go on to argue, the "natural end"
for a living thing is to remain in existence as the kind of thing it is. Man is
a rational animal -- that is our distinctive essence -- so our natural end is
to live as rational beings. In this way, the authors give the Objectivist
ethics a distinctly Aristotelian spin. The ultimate value is not life per se,
in the sense of survival, but living well, "flourishing," actualizing
our potentialities... [A]long the way the authors mention such items as
friendship, wealth, and productive work, as well as the exercise of such
virtues as rationality, courage, and integrity.

In any case, they regard flourishing as an objective value, with
objective requirements for its realization... Moreover reason and reasoned
choice is not merely a means to the ultimate end. It is a constituent of the
end itself.

Why do Rasmussen and Den Uyl feel the need to depart from Rand?
Kelley goes on:

The concept of flourishing is introduced as
an Aristotelian amendment to the Objectivist ethics... Rasmussen and Den Uyl
are concerned...that life in the sense of 'mere' survival will not give us much
of an ethical code. "Flourishing" is supposed to be
a richer concept: it means living well, through the realization of a wide range
of our capacities.

By contrast, the "Survivalist" camp, represented by
Objectivists, argues that "Flourishers" fail to ground their ethics
in any objective requirements of nature and reality. "...[H]ow do we determine what is
involved in flourishing?" Kelley asks in his review. "In Ayn Rand's
approach, every value and every virtue that goes to make up a good life must be
shown to have a bearing on survival; in one way or another, it must enhance the
prospects for self-preservation... [O]nly the alternative of existence or
non-existence can sustain a nonarbitrary normative judgment that something is
good, right, or virtuous. So far as I can see, the concept of flourishing is an
attempt to skirt the problem. By incorporating all the cardinal values and
virtues into the fundamental end, the concept attempts to escape the need of
proving that they are necessary *means* to the end."

For their part, the "Flourishers" tend to deny that
moral virtues are only a means to any more ultimate end; rather, they are
simply part of the end, which is
"human flourishing." As one prominent Flourisher put it in an e-mail
message to me:

...man's life qua man is a way of living
that is defined by the possession and use of certain virtues (they are inherent
to that way of living), and that is what one should be doing. Living virtuously -- the life proper to man -- is the good. It is the
end in itself, the standard of value. What else could Rand be saying when she says
life is an end in itself? There is no necessary pay off in longer life, money,
power, pleasure, sex. These things are not bad, and they are usually either
means to or results of living the life proper to man, but these are not what
human living is all about.

At first glance, most Objectivists would read the preceding
paragraph and immediately reject the Flourisher position as an instance of
"intrinsicist" or deontologically-based ethics. Flourishers are
arguing that there are natural
requirements for all entities -- that human virtues and values are intrinsic to human nature. Just as a
horse must live qua horse, a man must live
qua man. Man is the rational animal;
hence man should exercise his
rational capacity. It's his nature. The "pay value" of living
virtuously is secondary: virtues are not a means to an end, but are part of the
end, which is "Man's life." Virtue, in a sense, is its own reward:
the reward of being human. We exist
not for external rewards, but to be the kind of entity we are.

In sum, Flourishers seem to be saying, "a man oughta do
what a man oughta do." However, that is clearly circular. Consider the quotation:
"Living virtuously -- the life proper to man -- is the good."
Translated, this means: the good is that which is proper, which is living
virtuously. This sort of formulation leaves all virtues vulnerable to a single
question: Why? To what in reality --
the Survivalists rightly reply -- do such normative terms refer? Where are the
Flourishers' "roots"?

In fact, the Flourishers are
trying to find some sort of a "natural end" in ethics, some objective
grounding. That aim they share with Survivalists. They believe that simply by
incorporating human virtues into their definition of human nature, they have
done so. Theirs is a strained, and ultimately unsuccessful, effort to provide
an alternative to the Objectivist, survival-based case for ethics.

But why? Why do Flourishers feel the need to reject the
Objectivist way of grounding ethics in survival? Because, they say, rooting
ethics merely in "life" or "survival" per se cannot
logically lead one to the kind of living
-- the "flourishing" -- that Ayn Rand seemed to celebrate in her
novels. It is to salvage those qualitative
aspects of human life -- life as an heroic, impassioned, fulfilled experience
-- that they feel the need to go beyond what her argument offers.

On mere survival grounds alone, man needs just the basics --
food, clothing, shelter, etc. Why, then, should
man go for more than that -- as Ayn Rand indicates they ought to? Does man
really "need" lobster rather than beef, evening gowns rather than
denims, Roarkian architecture rather than a lean-to? Even if we concede Rand's
case for basing ethics in the needs of "self-preservation" or
"life," how can we go beyond that? Why extol the lives of heroes
above that of ordinary people? Why Roark over Guy Francon? Why Rachmaninoff
over Elvis? And why have some of her characters take profound physical risks,
and contemplate or commit "justifiable" suicides, if
"survival" is the only or ultimate end?

How then, on grounds of mere "survival," can Rand go
beyond pursuing the basic necessities of survival, to justify and validate the
pursuit of these higher-order values?

It's a good question. In his review, even David Kelley admitted
that "Establishing these connections is a very large task, and I don't
think Objectivists have fully carried it out." Indeed, Henry Scuoteguazza
has argued persuasively in his essay, "Is Self-Interest Enough?," and
elsewhere, that Objectivism has not yet provided sufficient ethical guidance
for many ordinary aspects of living.

So before we dismiss the Flourishers' case out of hand, we
should confront the fact that neither
side has done a complete job of providing answers to some of the most basic
questions of ethics. While Survivalists make a good case that Flourishers
haven't properly grounded their ethics, Flourishers reply, with some justice,
that Survivalists haven't established the basis for anything more than
"brute survivalism."

Can a reading of Ayn Rand's own words on the subject break this
impasse? Alas, by selective quotation, she can be regarded as endorsing either side of this debate. Here are her
own words, plus words which, though coming from others, she had explicitly
endorsed while she still lived, and which may be taken as reliable commentary
on her own position:

Ayn Rand Qua "Survivalist"

It is for the purpose of self-preservation
that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the
man who desires to live.

-- Galt's Speech, Atlas Shrugged

The reason of man's need for morality
determines the purpose of morality as well as the standard by which moral values
are to be selected. Man needs a moral code in order to live; that is the
purpose of morality -- for every man as an individual....

Man, like every other living species, has a
specific manner of survival which is determined by his nature. Man is free to
act against the requirements of his nature, to reject his means of survival:
his mind -- but he is not free to escape the consequence: misery, anxiety,
destruction. When men attempt to exist by a means other than reason, it becomes
a matter of little more than chance who lasts a decade and who lasts a year,
who is wiped out by whom and who is able to consume some part of his gains
before the club descends on him.
Man's life depends on thinking, not on acting blindly; on achievement, not on
destruction; nothing can change that fact. Mindlessness, passivity, parasitism,
brutality are not and cannot be principles of survival; they are merely the
policy of those who do not wish to face the issue of survival.

"Man's life" means: life lived in
accordance with the principles that
make man's survival qua man possible.

Some philosophers ascribed to man, as a
metaphysical attribute, a particular desire
or conatus; they declared it to be
universal and innate; then they stated that an objective ethics, one genuinely
based on man's nature, would be one that enabled man to achieve this desire or
striving. Aristotle spoke of the universal desire for eudaimonia (happiness or well-being); Epicurus -- of the universal
desire for pleasure....

In no sense does Ayn Rand regard any
particular value as a metaphysical given, as pre-existing in man or in the
universe. She begins by observing the facts that create the need for values. The basic facts of
man's nature from which her ethics proceeds, are: that man's life, like that of
any other organism, must be sustained by self-generated action; that the course
of action required is specific, as it
is specific for every species; that man is a being of volitional consciousness;
that man has no automatic code of behavior, but must discover the actions and
values his life requires; that reason is man's basic means of survival. She answers
the question "What are values and why does man need them?" by
analyzing man's distinctive nature in the context of the universal class of
living organisms. That is the great originality of her approach. She does not
advocate a single moral principle that cannot be traced back, by an unbroken
logical chain, to the demonstrable requirements of man's survival qua man.

-- Nathaniel Branden, Ibid.

I could go on, but you get the drift. Such statements abound in
the Objectivist literature, and their point is that the concept of life is the
root of the concept of "value" -- both epistemologically and existentially. All this would seem to
buttress a very narrow "survivalist" reading of Rand's ethics. That
interpretation has certainly been abetted by more recent formulations, e. g.,
those of [philosopher Leonard] Peikoff. Consider this:

Goal-directed entities do not exist in
order to pursue values. They pursue values in order to exist. Only self-preservation
can be an ultimate goal, which serves no end beyond itself.

-- Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand,
p. 211.

But is this last interpretation a full and reliable one?
Consider now...

Ayn Rand Qua "Flourisher"

You seek escape from pain. We seek the
achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We
exist for the sake of earning rewards.

-- Galt's Speech, Atlas Shrugged

Now please compare:

Peikoff: "Goal-directed entities do not exist in order to
pursue values. They pursue values in order to exist."

Rand/Galt: "We seek the achievement of happiness...We exist
for the sake of earning rewards."

So which is it? Peikoff seems to be saying that the sole point
of seeking rewards (values) is to sustain life. Rand's own words seem to say
the opposite -- that life becomes worth
living as it becomes rewarding or fulfilling. In fact, in other passages,
she becomes absolutely explicit about it:

...that as man must produce the physical
values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining [emphasis added]... that to live requires
a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic
sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his
moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create,
but must create by choice... a soul that seeks above all [emphasis added] to achieve
its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself.

-- Galt's Speech, Atlas Shrugged

Just as man's physical survival depends on
his own effort, so does his psychological
survival. Man faces two corollary, interdependent fields of action in which
a constant exercise of choice and a constant creative process are demanded of
him: the world around him and his own soul (by "soul," I mean his
consciousness). Just as he has to produce the material values he needs to
sustain his life, so he has to acquire
the values of character that enable him to sustain it and that make his life
worth living. He is born without knowledge of either. He has to discover
both -- and translate them into reality -- and survive by shaping the world and himself in the image of his values.
[Emphasis added.]

-- Ayn Rand, “The Goal
of My Writing," The Romantic
Manifesto

These passages make clear that Rand was concerned with more than
physical survival. She argued explicitly that man had to acquire the kind of
character values that sustain his
life-serving activities, but more: "that make his life worth living."
Obviously, to Rand, any life per se was not
necessarily a "life worth living." Her fiction lends ample
corroboration: the suicides of Andrei Taganov, Gail Wynand and Cheryl Taggart.
These characters portrayed lives which could have continued for some time, but
which were no longer "worth living." (I include Wynand since Rand had
him commit suicide in her film script.) John Galt, Rand's premier exemplar,
gives unmistakable testimony to this in the following passage from Part III,
Chapter 8 of Atlas Shrugged. Galt is
talking to Mr. Thompson, the nation's "leader," who has been making
veiled threats about using physical force against Galt, perhaps even killing
him:

“Don't you want to live?” [asks Thompson.]

"Passionately” [replies Galt]. He saw
the snap of a spark in Mr. Thompson's eyes and smiled. “I'll tell you more: I
know that I want to live much more intensely than you do. I know that that's
what you're counting on. I know that you, in fact, do not want to live at all.
I want it. And because I want it so much, I will accept no substitute.”

"...I will accept no substitute." Can there be any
doubt Galt is here acknowledging that -- yes -- if he submits, he may be
permitted to continue to exist indefinitely; but -- no -- he doesn't want that kind of existence.

True, it is the need to live that gives rise to the need for
values; virtues are simply means to
the achievement of life-serving values, and not ends-in-themselves. But observe
that there is more at stake than mere physical survival. In Rand's view, enjoyment of life plays a crucial role.

Another part of Galt's Speech makes clear that "The purpose
of morality is to teach you...to enjoy yourself and live." And: "Virtue
is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for
the reward of evil. Life is the
reward of virtue -- and happiness is the
goal and reward of life." [Emphasis added.]

For man, happiness -- not just survival -- is the final goal,
and reward, of a specifically human
life. The ultimate rewards she hoped men would gain from adopting her ethics
were (surprise!) emotional. The
experience of passionate engagement with life -- of meaning and purpose -- of
spiritual grandeur, exaltation, joy...this state, to her, made "life worth
living."

Yet Rand did not take the state of happiness and well-being as
an irreducible primary. She viewed it biocentrically.
In "The Psychology of Pleasure," an essay published in Feb. 1964
under Rand's auspices in The Objectivist
Newsletter, Nathaniel Branden writes:

Pleasure, for man, is not a luxury, but a
profound psychological need. Pleasure (in the widest sense of the term) is a
metaphysical concomitant of life, the reward and consequence of successful
action -- just as pain is the insignia of failure, destruction, death. Through
the state of enjoyment, man experiences the value of life, the sense that life
is worth living, worth struggling to maintain. In order to live, man must act
to achieve values. Pleasure or enjoyment is at once an emotional payment for
successful action and an incentive to continue acting... Thus, in letting man
experience, in his own person, the sense that life is a value and that he
is a value, pleasure serves as the emotional fuel of man's existence.

Objectivism is emphatically a biocentric philosophy: it is
concerned with the values -- including psychological values -- Man needs to
sustain his life. There is no doubt that it is in basic survival that the
Objectivist ethics has its roots.

But these roots aren't the entire tree.

Part II

There are serious difficulties with both the Survivalist and the
Flourisher positions, as usually put forth.

1. Problems with Survivalism

The fundamental problem with the Survivalist position commonly
put forth is that it doesn't get us very far down the road of ethics.

First, it's not quite accurate to describe Objectivism as a
strictly Survivalist philosophy. If survival alone is the true focus of the
Objectivist ethics, then Ayn Rand's emphasis on projecting heroes and exalting
human character becomes unintelligible. Billions of people have managed to
survive -- not always very happily or well, perhaps, but at least survive --
with no heroes or ideals worthy of the name. Yet this was no peripheral concern
of Rand's: it was her raison d'etre.
"The goal of my writing," she often said, "is the projection of
an ideal man."

Similarly, Rand advocated not just the sustenance of life through
a productive career; she held an exalted view of such a career. To survive, an
architect surely needs clients; but he doesn't need to produce a Stoddard
Temple. To survive, a single woman may need a job; she doesn't need to run a
Taggart Transcontinental. Yet Rand's heroes and heroines treat their work not
as "a job" -- not even as "an adventure" -- but as a sacred
mission. That, in fact, is the view of life I get from virtually every page of
Ayn Rand.

What makes her heroes and heroines distinctive is not that they
are self-supporting, but rather, how
they are self-supporting -- how they see themselves, their lives, their values,
their work. It is this exalted sense -- the view of actualizing one's full
potential on earth -- that makes Rand's characters, and her ethics, utterly
unique. And for Rand, when the quest to pursue exalted human values is impaired
in some irreparable way, then life is truly no longer "worth living."

Contrary to base Survivalism, Rand simultaneously argued
something more. She acknowledged that there were degrees of pleasure, and that
-- ideally -- man's ultimate reward for heroic action in service of human life
and values was a state of exaltation.
While pleasure had life-serving motivational force (and hence a biological grounding),
the kind of intense, exalted pleasure she celebrated also served, for those who
earned it, as an ultimate end and reward for successful living.

No, it was not mere "survivalism" that drew to Ayn
Rand an audience of millions, especially of young people, yearning for some
ideal that made sense to them. She clearly intended something more than a subsistence ethics. Try reading her “Introduction
to The Fountainhead” from that
perspective -- or her tribute to "Apollo 11" -- or her passage about
the radiant joy on a child's face in "Requiem for Man" (in Capitalism the Unknown Ideal) -- or her
entire Romantic Manifesto. Try
reading the opening passage of Part II, Chapter 8 of Atlas Shrugged -- in which Dagny is trying desperately to
"survive" without a long-range purpose, in a cabin in the woods --
and consider the emotional torture she's undergoing. Try reading the part of The Fountainhead where Roark has to
abandon his architectural career for lack of clients, and what he emotionally
must endure. Physical survival, these passages shout, is not enough.

Thus, I reject interpretations which suggest that Rand's aim was
only to improve our long-term survival odds, to move us as far as possible from
threats to our survival, or to provide a basic moral calculus for designing
survival strategies. I do not see, in her fictional heroes, any cool
calculations of careers and actions along such narrow lines.

Does this move Rand into the camp of the Flourishers, then? Not
really.

2. Problems with Flourishing

The arguments put forth by prominent Flourishers suffer from
circularity and arbitrariness. If we ask, "Why should man reason?" -- it is not sufficient to answer,
"Because he's a rational animal" -- which only translates to:
"Because he reasons." Answering the question, "Because it
advances self-preservation" may not be a fully complete or elegant answer;
but at least, it's an answer. Though (contrary to the Survivalists) Rand
clearly wanted people to aspire to more than mere physical survival, she also
saw (contrary to the Flourishers) that such aspirations required biocentric
(survival) roots.

There are other basic problems with the Flourishers' position as
well.

One prominent Flourisher wrote to me that "virtue"
means "how well a living thing performs its natural function. A living
thing's natural function is not merely to live but to live as the kind or sort
of thing it is. For a human being this means that one needs to live as a
rational animal."

The Aristotelian/Flourisher case, in sum, is this: "Man is
a rational animal; hence, in accord with his nature, he should reason." It proceeds deductively from a definition of
man that stresses his rational nature, and thus seems to imply a kind of
metaphysical imperative to reason. Hence, Man's "natural function"
(to reason) may be inferred from his definition ("rational animal").

Put another way, the Flourisher way of "grounding virtue in
nature" begins by metaphysicalizing
essences: by treating the essential or defining traits of a concept (e.g.,
rational animal) as if they are actual metaphysical existents "out
there" in nature, rather than contextual, epistemological identifications.

On this basis, the "natural function" of a man, a
squirrel or a knife is reduced to its defining trait alone. Because the
defining trait of man is his rational capacity, Flourishers conclude, in
effect, "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" -- literally. But as
Rand put it in "Causality Vs. Duty," the only thing a man's gotta do is die.

The error here is two-fold. First, treating entities as only
their defining characteristics
(rather than as the entirety of their attributes); second, viewing those
defining traits as a "natural deontology" -- that is, holding that an
entity has a kind of natural duty
("natural function") to behave in accordance with its defining
(essential) traits.

Definitions consider only selected
attributes. These "essences" are not metaphysical; they are
epistemological. They do not exist per se in nature, thereby "naturally"
obligating the entity possessing them to behave this way or that. Rather, the
"essential" or "defining" characteristics of a concept are
simply those which human beings have identified as contextually essential for purposes of drawing useful distinctions
among concepts. They are human
identifications, not metaphysical existents of intrinsic significance.

For example, the concept "man" subsumes everything about him, not just his
"essential," defining attribute (i. e., his rational capacity). Among
his other attributes is his volitional capacity. Now consider what happens if,
in defining "man," we substitute (for "rational animal")
the phrase: "a being of volitional, conceptual consciousness." In the
appropriate contexts, either definition could be valid, focusing on equally
real and significant aspects of human nature. However, by substituting the
definition "a being of volitional, conceptual consciousness,"
suddenly the apparent metaphysical imperative to "be rational" vanishes.
A definition that focuses on volition does not
suggest that man "should" do anything in particular: volition
precludes any metaphysical "shoulds" or "oughts."

Man is also the only creature (to our best knowledge) equipped
by nature with esthetic sensitivities. Why can't we say, "man's natural
function is to create and appreciate art"? Why can't we also say it's his
"natural function" to be musical, to play baseball, or to go out on
dates?

Clearly, the aim of the Flourishers is to try to reduce
morality, by definitions, to simple commandments of nature. But nature, as
such, issues no commandments -- least of all to entities whose
"essence" must be exercised by volition. There is no commandment of
nature that says that "a man must
think." Even if we were to posit, for sake of argument, that "a fish must swim" or "a bird must fly," given Man's unique
volitional capacity, he would remain an exception to this list of natural
"musts."

To say that "My morality...is based on a single choice --
to live" (Galt's Speech) is very different from saying, "a living
thing's natural function is...to live
as the kind or sort of thing it is." The latter view of
"essences" and "natural functions" is an example of
intrinsicist, not Objectivist, epistemology. It is the idea that certain
attributes are intrinsically significant
to an entity, rather than contextually
significant.

3. An Objectivist Synthesis?

Objectivism is a kind of synthesis of both Survivalist and
Flourisher concerns: the Survivalists' concern about grounding ethics, and the
Flourishers' concerns about providing men with more-than-subsistence moral
guidance.

Yet a problem remains. Rand herself obviously meant her ethics
to lead us to more than just
survival. Why? Because man is more than just a physical body. His
"soul" (consciousness) also has a certain identity -- a nature which
cannot be ignored or violated with impunity, any more than can his physical
nature.

But though Ayn Rand was correct in rooting the Objectivist
ethics in human survival, it is a big logical leap from those Survivalist
roots, to such Flourishing branches and blossoms as the Stoddard Temple,
"man-worship," Apollo 11 and Rachmaninoff. This is the criticism and
concern of the Flourishers, and in my view, it's a legitimate one. How, then,
do we resolve this problem?

A possible clue can be inferred by juxtaposing two quotations
from Rand. The first we have already seen:

It is for the purpose of self-preservation
that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the
man who desires to live.

-- Galt's Speech, Atlas Shrugged

The differences between Survivalists and Flourishers exist
largely because both sides are interpreting the terms
"self-preservation" and "live" only in a physical way.
Since both sides assume Rand meant to ground all her ethics in pure
life-or-death subsistence, the only choice was to agree with her or not.
Survivalists do, while Flourishers don't think that's morally adequate.

But what if their premise is mistaken?

As evidence, consider the second quotation, from Part IV,
Chapter 2 of The Fountainhead, where
Roark meets Gail Wynand for the first time. Roark is explaining to Wynand the
symbolic meaning of productive work. He says:

We live in our minds, and existence is the
attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form.

If we take this formulation as giving wider context and meaning
to the first, then a question occurs: In using the terms "self-preservation"
and "life," what meanings did Rand intend? What if the
"self" and "life" Rand alluded to was something much more
than one's mere physical survival?

Consider her position on abortion. In that area, she views
"selfhood" far more broadly than just a physical life. It is
"self" in the sense of "person" -- selfhood in the sense of
personhood. Human rights, to her, are not rights of a mindless body, arising
from physical processes alone, but rights of selfhood, or of personality.
The realm of ethics does not apply to entities which do not possess a human
level of consciousness -- hence, neither do rights. That's why Rand regards the
mother, not the fetus, as possessing rights: only the mother is truly, fully
human (i.e., a "self").

In fact, anyone familiar with the entire body of her work would
have to conclude that the "self" at the root of Rand's ethics is not
"self qua physical body,"
but "self qua human being."
And if we interpret "self-preservation" in Rand to mean
"selfhood-preservation," or "personhood-preservation" --
then the false alternative of "survive versus flourish" simply
evaporates, permitting a possible reconciliation or synthesis between the two
sides:

A).
First, we meet the Survivalists' valid concern about grounding ethics in
nature. "Life" is indeed the source of values for all species,
including man. But the specific basis for moral
values is human life. Rand's
formulation about "life being the genetic root of values" was only a
broad epistemological linkage; it was never intended to be an ultimate
grounding for ethics, whose roots are not in generic "life" per se,
but specifically in human life.

"Man, like every other living species, has a specific
manner of survival which is determined by his nature," wrote Branden in
his authorized interpretation of Rand. Yet for man, "survival" or
"self-preservation" is more than survival or self-preservation at the
animal level. Man's basic level of
survival is -- unavoidably -- a human
kind of survival. One cannot reduce "self-preservation" for man
back any further, to mere animal-level functioning, because that's simply not man's nature.

This, then, is the key to resolving the survive/flourish
dichotomy. Rand's ethics does not begin with plant life, or animal life -- but
solely and exclusively with human
life. Why? Because subhuman life is outside the realm of ethics. Morality is
exclusively a human concern. Put another way: her intention wasn't to reduce
ethics back to "life qua
life," but only as far back as "man's life."

So, the "self" she referred to in
"self-preservation" means: the human self. It does not mean merely
saving one's skin; it means preserving
one's personhood -- all that one's person has, aspires to or values. Thus
understood, the "preservation of Man's life" translates, for each
person, into the specific aspects
which make his own life "worth living."

For a Roark, "self-preservation" could well include
the terms and conditions that would enable him to build a Stoddard Temple --
because if he couldn't, the entity we call "Roark" would no longer
exist, or find his life worth living. Likewise, for a Dagny,
"self-preservation" would be intimately bound up with the welfare of
Taggart Transcontinental -- for without it, she would no longer be able to
function happily as the unique "person" we call Dagny Taggart. For
others, it would mean those personal values in which they have invested their
own "selves": their careers, families, homes, financial well-being,
etc. The broad principles of rational self-interest tell us only that these
values must be objectively consistent with human well-being; but within those
rational limits, the specific values each individual chooses (and thus
incorporates into his "self") can vary almost infinitely.

B).
Second, we meet the Flourishers' valid concern that ethics guide us beyond mere
brute subsistence. Understood expansively, "self-preservation" would
include the entire realm of personality: one's ideas, thoughts, emotions,
values -- all that contributes to one's "self" qua human being. If Rand meant this, "rational
self-interest" or "survival qua
man" would thus mean something like: "that which objectively
contributes to the survival of a 'self' or human personality -- including its
objective interests and rational values." So conceived, Rand would be
positing an ethics for survival of the individual
person -- which closely resembles the notion of "flourishing."

Under such an interpretation, the distinction between
"rational self-interest" and "flourishing" largely
disappears -- which means that the distinction between "surviving"
and "flourishing" also disappears. The same actions that, for man,
advance "self"-preservation, are those entailed by
"flourishing." Why? Because for man, "survival" means
"survival as a human being" -- and so does "flourishing."

The Flourishers almost
have it right. Rand's ethics is very close to their own, except that hers is
far more clearly grounded in nature. Rand shares the Flourishers' concern with
the activity of being human. But Rand
begins by grounding that concern in nature: in that which objectively sustains
one's human-ness -- one's "self."

Now -- is Bidinotto saying that the "good" is anything
that contributes to the survival of any
"self" -- no matter what that person thinks, values, believes, feels,
does, etc.? If self-preservation is the core of ethics, is the "self"
of a John Galt morally equivalent to the "self" of a James Taggart?
Are all "selves" created equal? Or is there an objective basis for
Bidinotto's kind of self-preservation?

Part III

A "self" is a specific consciousness or identity, and
its survival and well-being is not arbitrary. Just as the existence of life is
conditional, so is the survival of a self.

Self-preservation, in the human sense, depends on a rational
course of action. Some values, ideas, emotions and actions objectively
contribute to the creation and sustenance of a self, or a human identity;
others demonstrably erode and undermine one's identity, bringing one nothing but
confusion, conflict, turmoil, anxiety, pain, guilt, grief, despair and -- yes
-- even physical destruction, in extreme cases.

An objection might be raised as follows: "Okay, you've just
described what it takes to sustain a rational
personality. But suppose I'm an irrationalist and want to stay that way. I'm a
malicious fiend, and love it. Clearly, the ideas and values that will sustain
my kind of 'self' don't have to be rational ones. In fact, they would have to
be irrational ones."

This notion treats an "irrational self" as just
another kind of "self." But it isn't. Irrational ideas and values are
not just other items on the moral menu. Irrational ideas and values are those
which collide with reality. They lead
to destruction -- not to some "alternative" kind of life.

Self-preservation ethics is not
relativistic about what a self can be. An "irrational self" is a
contradiction in terms. It is precisely the absence of a self -- or at best, a
self in chaotic disintegration. You either have a personality, an identity, a
self, and are working to maintain it -- or you don't and aren't. To continue to
flout reality, an irrational person would be guaranteeing the eventual
destruction of any remaining remnants of his battered identity. Irrationalism is,
psychologically, "self"-destruction.

So it is as meaningless for one to speak of the
"self-preservation" of a non-self as it would be to speak of the
"preservation of a void." A Peter Keating, for example, is not simply
an alternative kind of self: he's the flotsam of a self that was not rationally
sustained. He in fact has no identity. He's a non-entity, masquerading as an
entity. (For support of this view, see Nathaniel Branden's Psychology of Self-Esteem.)

But there are other interesting implications of this view of
selfhood.

"Self"-Objectification

"We live in our minds," says Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, "and existence is
the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture
and form."

Human life, this suggests, consists of the objectification of
one's values in the external world -- making it over in the image and likeness
of our internal "world."
That internal world is the self. By this view, we are each God, in a personal
quest to transform the world into the shape and form of our internal world, or
self. Projecting, objectifying and externalizing our values gives us pleasure,
because we are actualizing our vision of how things ought to be -- remaking
reality in our own image and likeness.

We do this in countless ways, through our own creativity.
Whether we raise a garden or a child, tidy up our house or our philosophical
premises, write a novel or a letter to the editor, we seem to be striving
ceaselessly to shape the "out there" in the image of our private
"in here."

The life aim of each person may be described as "the
objectification of the self." As long as one's self (e. g., ideas, values,
ends, etc.) is consonant with reason and reality, what I would call
"rational self-objectification" more or less describes the proper
human enterprise.

Rational self-objectification may be seen as the Flourishing
aspect of life, while "rational self-interest" is the Survival
aspect. The survival aspect stems from our need, as biological entities, to
create, gain and keep life-serving values; it's essentially based on
appropriation of life-serving values from
the world. But the flourishing aspect of life goes in the other direction: it
entails the projection of our own created values back into the world.

There are still other, more subtle implications of this
viewpoint. Consider, for example, how rational self-objectification might
modify brute Survivalism.

Psychological "Self"-Defense

I have often thought of how I might react if confronted by the
sight of a criminal attacking some stranger. I am virtually positive I would
get involved, perhaps even at grave risk to my physical survival. But why? In
examining my feelings, here's what I come up with.

I view such a matter as a core issue of my personal symbolism
about how the world should, and shouldn't, be. The criminal is not just
attacking a stranger; he is attacking all that I value. He is attacking my world...me. He fills me with indignation, because he and his sort are
undermining the world I wish to create, the world I want. I can't walk past
such a sight indifferently; and the fact that I don't know the victim
personally is irrelevant. It is not the stranger-victim I so intensely value
here: it is my world as I want it.

Similar considerations go into my risking my neck to save a
stranger in peril during an emergency. I don't know anything about the
stranger. I do know that I am making my personal statement against the triumph
of raw circumstances over human life, and over my volition. What jumps into my
head is not, "I have a moral obligation to the stranger," but rather,
"Not if I have anything to say
about this!" You see, it's my
world that's under assault.

There's a scene in We the
Living, if my memory serves me correctly, in which young Kira sits with a
girl who's being mistreated by all the other girls in the school. She explains
that she's not doing it so much for the sake of the harassed girl, as she is
taking a stand against the behavior
of the mob. In effect, she is asserting her own personal view of ethics into
the social arena. That is the sense
in which I'm speaking here.

Now, some might ask: "Isn't that irrational? By what
standard do you project your personal value onto things which, objectively,
have nothing to do with your personal survival -- things which, in fact, could
actually jeopardize your personal survival?"

My reply would be: "Why do you project your personal value
onto your wife, your child, your house, your wedding ring, your pet, or
anything else?" In fact, we do this all the time, incorporating all manner
of external values, many having only the most remote connection to physical
survival as such. We appropriate them, in a psychological sense, making them
"part of us" -- part of our world, part of our selves. After all,
Objectivism teaches that our lives are not lived exclusively "in
here" or "out there": they are a relationship between the two. A
man who doesn't project his inner
values externally, or appropriate external values as his own, can hardly be
said to have a self in the human sense.

I would also ask: "Couldn't Rearden survive without Rearden
Metal? Couldn't Roark survive without architecture? Couldn't Dagny survive
without Taggart Transcontinental? Why did Dagny intervene and save the bum on
the train? Why did Kira intervene on behalf of the abused girl?" If what
I'm suggesting grossly misinterprets Rand, why did she have Roark urge Wynand not to give up his final editorial
crusade on his, Roark's, behalf -- even though Wynand's crusade, objectively
speaking, was harming Roark himself?
On strictly Survivalist grounds, this act by Roark is outrageously irrational.

Only if we interpret Roark's "selfishness" in a manner
as I am suggesting, does it make any sense: his "self" has
incorporated Wynand's well-being as a crucial part of his own well-being. He
will be damaged far more by Wynand's destruction than by public outrage, or
even a prison term. He is acting, in short, in psychological
"self"-defense.

I simply cannot understand the full corpus of Ayn Rand's work --
especially her fiction -- to mean something very different from what I have
suggested in this essay. As far as I can see, it is the only interpretation
compatible with all that she wrote. And -- unless I'm missing something very
subtle -- it is the only interpretation which simultaneously grounds ethics in
nature, while extending ethics beyond considerations of mere subsistence.

It's time for a truce between the Survivalists and the
Flourishers. Properly understood, Objectivism can bridge the legitimate
concerns of both camps.

Our common aim? To offer the world an ethics that is firmly
rooted in biological reality, yet rich enough to span all the complex
contextual considerations of human life on earth -- an ethics that supports and
sustains human life, but which also makes human life worth living.

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About Me

I'm a best-selling author and an award-winning journalist and editor. My first novel, "HUNTER," hit #4 on the Kindle Bestseller List and #1 in "Mysteries & Thrillers," as well as the Wall Street Journal's "Top Ten Fiction Ebook" list. It's available as a Kindle ebook and a trade paperback at Amazon.com; an audiobook edition is available through Amazon, Audible.com, and iTunes.

The sequel, "BAD DEEDS" won the CLFA "Book of the Year 2014 Award." WINNER TAKES ALL -- the third installment in my Dylan Hunter thriller series -- was released in late 2017 to rave reviews.

I've contributed to Reader's Digest, The Boston Herald, PJ Media, and many publications.

Be sure to visit my FICTION blog, "The Vigilante Author," at: www.bidinotto.com, where I discuss thrillers, publishing, and the hero of my bestselling thrillers, Dylan Hunter -- "the new face of justice."